Predefined-Time Active Fault-Tolerant Control of Transport Aircraft Subject to Control Surface Failures

• Published in: IEEE transactions on aerospace and electronic systems Vol. 61; no. 3; pp. 5731 - 5744
• Main Authors: Li, Yu, Wang, Tianqi, Liu, Xiaoxiong, Wen, Chih-yung
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2025; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Active fault-tolerant control (FTC); Actuators; Aerodynamics; Aerospace electronics; Aircraft; Aircraft control; Atmospheric modeling; control surface failures; Control surfaces; Convergence; Design parameters; Disturbance observers; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; Flight control systems; incremental control; Initial conditions; predefined-time (PdT) control; Robustness; Simulation; Surface cracks; Transport aircraft
• ISSN: 0018-9251; 1557-9603
• DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2024.3523878

This article presents a predefined-time (PdT)-based incremental backstepping with a PdT disturbance observer control scheme for transport aircraft. Based on this control scheme, an active fault-tolerant flight controller (AFTFC) is designed to achieve PdT fault-tolerant control under control surface failures. By constructing a nonlinear state transformation function, the damaged aircraft's attitude angles are restricted within a safe range. The designed AFTFC ensures that the damaged aircraft can robustly retrack its desired commands within a PdT with a bounded steady-state error, while the settling time is user-defined, which does not depend on the initial conditions or design parameters. More importantly, AFTFC also addresses the issue of robustness degradation due to state differentiation disturbances in traditional incremental control. Real-time simulation experiments are presented to verify the effectiveness of the designed AFTFC.